by R S Penney
All the while, those shots kept coming.
Most flew over her, striking the pots and pans that hung from racks on the ceiling. Others hit the island or the cupboards. Her enemies didn't yet have a good angle to shoot at her. But they were coming. Seth was afraid. Anna didn't blame him. She tried to offer comforting emotions, but the Nassai beat her to the punch.
The prickling tingle in her skin said that she had pushed Seth further than he would like to go; using her special abilities at this point might actually result in her passing out from the strain. And that was a best case scenario.
She reached the pantry and sat up just long enough to pull the heavy door open. She crawled inside, staying low just in case a stray bullet came this way. The door swung shut behind her. It was utterly dark in here, but she could sense the layout of the room through her connection to Seth. Shelves lined all four walls and separated much of the floorspace into narrow aisles.
The top shelf on the wall to her right held several large wooden barrels. Wine, she assumed. With the crew of this station stuck out here in the middle of nowhere – cut off from their own people – they would keep a few luxuries.
Rubbing her nose with the back of her hand, Anna heaved out a deep breath. “Okay. Think, Lenai,” she said to herself. “There has gotta be something that you can use to your advantage in here.”
She got to her feet and walked through one of the aisles, scanning the contents of each shelf with her mind. Only then did she notice the silence. The guards had stopped firing blindly into the kitchen.
She spun around.
The pantry door swung open, revealing two silhouettes standing side by side, each with large bulbous helmets for heads. The fact that they didn't immediately start shooting proved they had some sense. It was generally a good idea to avoid pulling the trigger until you knew what you would hit.
Anna aimed for the barrels on the high shelf.
She fired and listened for the loud POP of cracking wood. Dark liquid splashed out, falling on both men and causing them to stumble backward in surprise. Now she just had to finish them off.
She squeezed the trigger again.
A stun-round took one guard in the neck, where his armour couldn't protect him. Electric current surged through his body, his arms and legs flailing about as he dropped his rifle and fell to the floor.
The other one lifted his weapon. He let loose and sent a wild spray of bullets into the pantry, each one bouncing off the metal shelves with a high-pitched ping! Anna dropped to her knees to avoid being hit.
“Get moving!” she muttered, crawling through the aisle toward the door. She took aim and fired a few more shots.
Slugs hit the man's chest, the current absorbed by his armour. Each one delivered the force of a hard punch, however, and the man went stumbling back. His arms drooped, and then he was firing down at the floor.
Chunks of tile flew upward, bouncing off the visor of his helmet. He collided with the corner of the stainless-steel island and fell hard onto his ass. “Damn it! Damn it! Flay me alive under the Mother's eye!”
One last stun round hit the soft fabric that covered his neck, and then he spasmed, keeling over with a low-pitched groan. His arm twitched a few times before he finally went still. It was over.
She had to get out of this kitchen before more guards came.
As he crouched down with his back to the wall, Jack listened to the sound of voices growing louder and louder. The small conference room in which he had taken refuge was almost totally dark, but he could still make out the long table and chairs.
A set of square-shaped windows on the far wall looked out on the hallway, the view partially hidden behind thin blinds. He saw three guards in heavy tactical gear creeping along through the corridor. Two men and one woman.
One ventured a glance through the window, his face contorting behind the visor of his helmet. If he saw Jack, he gave no sign of it. Instead, the three just kept going without pause. That was close.
Jack hung his head, breathing deeply through his nose. Sweat drenched his hair and made his skin itch. Too close, he added. Give them a few minutes to get gone, Hunter, and then find a new hiding place.
His earpiece squawked.
“Jack?”
Squeezing his eyes tight, he banged his head against the wall. “Nice to hear from you, An,” he replied. “If you're in trouble, you might have to wait a few moments before I can get to you.”
“I'm fine,” she said. “You?”
Jack covered his face with one hand, massaging his aching eyelids with the tips of his fingers. His skin was on fire. “Fine,” he answered. “But I'm not sure how much longer I can avoid the patrols.”
“And Summer?”
“Strained.”
“Seth too,” she explained. “I pushed myself a little harder than I would like. I think it's time we started making our way back to the cargo bay. With any luck, Ben already has the telepath with him.”
“Agreed,” he said. “See you there.”
Chapter 13
The gray-brown surface of Ganymede filled her canopy window while a wireframe outline of an Antauran fighter sped toward her. Bright blue particle bursts threatened to overpower her shields.
Jena thumbed the hat-switch.
Her ship slid upward, and the bolts zipped past under her belly. The wireframe of her enemy was still there in her window. She reoriented herself and fired with her own particle weapons.
Thin orange bolts converged on her enemy, which flashed as its shields absorbed the impact. “Take that, you little shit,” Jena said. “I was flying these things before you even learned to shave your-”
A harsh screeching sound.
The shuttle used audio signals to alert her to the presence of someone on her tail. She pulled up and watched the moon slide away to be replaced by a field of twinkling stars in the endless night.
Her opponent was still on her ass. The shuttle shook when particle beams hit its backside, jostling her around in her chair. Thankfully, she had always been immune to motion sickness.
She eased back on the throttle, using reverse thrusters to decrease her speed. That ought to do it. Those alarms grew louder and more desperate as a fighter came up behind her at ramming speed.
She hit the hat switch.
Her shuttle dropped a few meters, and the enemy flew past over her head, his tiny fighter shaped like the head of an arrow. Orienting herself, she switched to EMP rounds and fired a few hundred slugs into its tail.
That had an effect!
The Antauran fighter stopped maneuvering and flew in a perfectly straight line. With any luck, she had damaged the propulsion systems, and now the pilot was locked into whatever course he had set.
She stepped on a pedal and yawed around to the right, stars flying sideways in her window until Jupiter came into view. The planet was huge, half bathed in the sun's light so that one side was a mix of red and beige gas and the other dark as a politician's soul.
The smartglass on her window drew another wireframe to warn her that another fighter was coming her way, its weapons hot.
She pushed forward on the flight-stick.
Her shuttle's nose dipped, and she followed a course that would take her under the other ship. “Computer,” she said, tracking her opponent on the heads-up display. “Ready aft particle weapons. Fire on my mark.”
The ship flew past her.
“Mark.”
Her instruments revealed that she had scored a hit on its belly, her particle weapons punching right through the shields. Jena breathed out a sigh of relief. There were several more fighters buzzing around like angry bees, but she could keep them off her tail a good while longer. She didn't have to beat them; she only had to hold out long enough for her team to accomplish their mission.
The SlipGate was locked, preventing anyone from that wretched base from coming on board and sneaking up on her from behind. She would just have to hope that Anna or Ben would be able to get a signal out and te
ll her when they were ready for extraction.
It was going to be a long wait.
The corridors in Green Sector were no different from any of the others that Ben had seen since arriving on this base. Long, wide and sterile, they stretched on for hundreds of paces with doors in each wall. This installation was not designed for comfort or aesthetic pleasure; it was cold, efficient.
Ben moved through the corridors with a pistol in both hands, frowning into the distance. “Wonderful,” he said, eyebrows rising. “I could wander around for hours and never find my way.”
“This is so far beyond pointless…” He leaned his shoulder against the wall, taking a minute to catch his breath. “Jack, one day I'm gonna stop letting you talk me into these suicide missions.”
By some luck, he had come across the body of a stunned security officer before leaving Blue Sector. The man's ID badge would provide cover from the sensor nets, but it would not give him access to any key systems – he would need passwords for that – and without computer access, he may as well have been feeling his way through the dark.
There was no way to know that he was going in the right direction, nothing to say that he would find the Detention Area at the end of the next hallway. Still, something that he couldn't explain made him want to press on.
Ben gritted his teeth, hissing as he stared down at the floor. “Five more minutes,” he told himself for the fifteenth time. “If you don't find her in the next five minutes, you turn around and head back.”
No. He had to press on.
Remarkably, he had seen very few security officers since leaving Blue Sector. Of course, Jack and Anna were running amok back there; that was their job, after all. Still, he would have expected some level of resistance. So far, he had been able to avoid every patrol with a clever hiding spot and a little patience. It was almost as though something was clearing the way for him. The same something that made him press on? He didn't really want to think about it.
At the end of the corridor, he peeked around the corner to find a short hallway that ended in a set of double doors. Something told him that was the shuttle bay, but he could not say what.
Hanging his head, Ben felt a surge of heat in his cheeks. “If that leads me right into the security office…” he muttered. “Well…it wouldn't be the first time Jack convinced me to do something embarrassing.”
He made his way forward.
The doors at the end of the hallway slid apart, revealing – to his surprise – a huge room where Antauran shuttles were parked side by side like cars at one of those shopping malls Earthers liked. He saw a team of men and women in black armour marching two by two across the open floor.
Ben lifted his pistol.
He held the weapon in both hands, the muzzle pointed at one guard's neck. A firm squeeze of the trigger fired a stun round that hit the man just beneath the rim of his dark helmet. Electric current did the rest.
A second stun-round hit the next officer in line before anyone even registered why the first had lost his balance. Only then did they turn and scan the room for any sign of an intruder.
Ben charged through the door.
“Multi-tool active!” he bellowed as he ran like a spooked horse. “Program Two.” Instantly, he was surrounded by nearly two dozen transparent versions of himself, each Ben crashing into the others so that they intersected and blurred.
The guards at the back of the line hoisted up rifles but froze when they saw his otherworldly display. A single holographic decoy was useless, but dozens…Most people wouldn't know what to make of that. Ben fell on his ass, sliding across the floor.
Confusion lasted just a second before the guards decided to unload their magazines. It didn't really matter which Ben they hit; one of them had to be the genuine article. He watched as bullets tore through his ghostly companions.
Ben slid to a stop, unclipping a force-field generator from his belt. The program ended, and his doppelgangers vanished, leaving him face to face with a small crowd of tactical officers who were aiming at nothing.
They saw him on the floor.
Ben triggered the generator, erecting a wall of flickering electrostatic energy before they could fire. Slugs crashed into the buzzing barrier, dropping uselessly to the floor on the other side.
He thrust his palm out and sent the wall toward his opponents, watching as it hit the first two and sent them flying like leaves on the wind. The others had spread out to form a horseshoe around him.
They all dropped to one knee, lifting up rifles to aim at him. There were eight in total, each holding an assault rifle with its muzzle pointed directly at his body. Even with body armour, he wouldn't survive that.
As he contemplated the grim reality of his demise, Ben felt a smidge of pride. He had knocked out four of his twelve opponents before they overpowered him. That was something. Of course, it didn't change the fact that he had done something monumentally stupid, something he would never have done if not for that strange force propelling him forward; he had charged head-first into a situation where the odds of survival were slim to nil. It would hurt like the Bleakness itself when they…Wait.
Why weren't they firing?
Each guard remained on one knee with his or her rifle pointed at Ben, poised to fire but refusing to follow through on the threat. What was going on here? He had never seen anything quite so odd.
Ben sat up.
A woman emerged from around the back end of a shuttle near the bay doors. Tall and slim, she wore a simple gray dress that complimented her dark skin tone, and for some reason, she kept her head shaved.
The woman lifted her chin, sniffing when she saw him. “I suggest you get to your feet, Tanaben Loranai,” she said. “We cannot keep them trapped in their dream world forever; you must do something.”
“Who's we?”
On cue, a second individual stepped out from behind the shuttle, this one a young man with none of the self-confidence evident in his female companion. He walked with his head down, refusing to make eye contact.
Like the woman, he wore simple gray clothing, but his skin was about as pale as humanly possible and his head shaved so that nothing but blonde stubble remained. “It hurts,” he pleaded. “I can't hold them all.”
The woman glanced in his direction, squinting as though unsure of what she saw. “You hold three,” she said. “Do not trouble me with your pitiful whining, Raynar. If you wish to live, you must make sacrifices.”
Ben wasted no time. He fired a stun-round into the arm of each remaining guards, watching as, one by one, they dropped to the floor with limbs flailing. When it was over, the woman let out a sigh of relief.
She winced, wiping sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. “My name is Keli Armana,” she said after a moment. “I am the one who summoned your companion, the Two-Soul who fights on the other side of the station.”
“You can hold five at once?”
“Ordinarily, no.”
His face tight with anxiety, Ben looked down at the floor. “Well, then you'll forgive me…” he said, backing away from her with hands raised defensively. “But how were you able to restrain them?”
Pressing her lips together, the woman studied him with large dark eyes. “I have had many long years to interact with these guards,” she said. “Many long years to chip away at their defenses, to make them more suggestable.”
“That's…”
“Academic for the time being.” She strode toward him with arms crossed, shaking her head the way his mother used to whenever he asked too many questions. “We do not have time to stand here and debate the ethics.”
Well, she was right about that much. A stun-round would put someone down for twenty minutes to half an hour, and they would be conscious for a large chunk of that time. Conscious but in no condition to fight. Nevertheless, there was no way to predict when one of those guards might regain his or her wits.
“Come on,” Ben said. “We're getting out of here.”
After ret
racing her steps, Anna made it back up to the third level, to the hallway outside the cargo bay. On her way, she had spotted a few security patrols leaving this sector of the station. It seemed the Antaurans were pulling their people back. That didn't bode well for her team.
Anna ran down the corridor.
“Not much further,” she muttered, stopping to peer around a corner. “Just get back to the SlipGate, contact Jena, and we can be on our way.”
The intersecting corridor was empty.
Half a minute at a quick jog brought her to the large double doors that led into the cargo bay. They slid apart when she approached. Emergency power would still leave the doors functional. It wouldn't do to let people be trapped.
Jack stood inside the bay with a pistol held in both hands, his head bowed almost reverently. In a heartbeat, he had the weapon pointed right at her chest, but he relaxed when he recognized her. Aside from Jack, there was no one else in this room. The men they had stunned must have recovered and departed.
Anna strode through the door with fists balled at her sides, frowning down at herself. “Well, at least you're here,” she said. “I kept imagining you getting ambushed by a security team just before you found the cargo bay.”
He offered a small smile, his cheeks turning pink. “I'm glad to see you too,” he said with a quick bob of his head. “Although it occurs to me that I should probably be insulted by your lack of faith in my abilities.”
She looked up at him with a broad grin, her brow slowly furrowing. “You still don't get it, huh?” she murmured. “It's not you I doubt, Jack, but my strong belief in the universe's sense of cruel irony means the person I care-”
The doors slid open behind her.
Ben strode into the cargo bay with his gun pointed down at the floor, head lolling with the weight of his exhaustion. “It's over,” he said. “I found the telepaths. Plural, by the way. Anna, your friend has a friend of her own.”
